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We'll start by walking through the decisions we made when building our system, explaining why we chose each particular component, and the effect the part has on the entire system. When we're done, you'll know why the PC worksand you'll be ready to build one of your own.

The first step in a DIY project is choosing what to make. There are a million reasons to own a PC, but you're not going to meet every need with one machine, so you have to decide on the tasks you want to accomplish. We wanted a system that could be the hub of a home entertainment system. That meant whatever we designed would need to be easy enough for the whole family to use, so the solution was a Windows Media Center PC.

A media center is a hub for storing, organizing, and distributing digital multimedia content. It's a recorder for over-the-air HDTV, a music manager, a repository for photos, a DVD player, and even a casual gaming system that outputs to the big-screen TV. Design considerations go beyond those for slapping together a vanilla PC, and that complicates the projectbut as you'll see, it's still not hard.

This system requires a few other traits besides ease of use. It must effectively multitask, since we plan to record multiple video streams simultaneously. The graphics hardware should focus on video playback rather than 3D performance, because we'll be watching more TV on this system (and be playing less Quake). We need plenty of hard drive space for storing and streaming large multimedia files, and a DVD recorder for creating our own DVDs. Finally, we want to minimize noisefan racket distracts from movies!